Open Monitoring Distribution (OMD) is an Open Source network, server, and datacenter monitoring platform and it’s absolutely fantastic. It’s basically a bunch of different monitoring systems all pooled into one platform. My favorite part of OMD is that it includes Check_MK, which I think is the best monitoring interface out there. But, it’s a lot more than that. Here is a breif list of what OMD contains (there’s more than this).

Nagios

Icinga

Shinken

Check_MK

Multisite

DokuWiki

NagVis

pnp4nagios

rrdtool

That’s just a brief list of all the greatness that’s packaged into OMD. Every network and home lab should have an OMD installation running on a virtual machine to keep tabs on everything and alert you when something goes wrong. Today, I’ll be installing and configuring OMD on an Ubuntu 14.04 virtual machine. So, lets get started already.

Installing OMD on Ubuntu 14.04

I always like to make sure everything is updated and upgraded when I’m setting up a new server. So lets go ahead and do that.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y upgrade

Now we can get to work installing OMD. Fortunately, there are OMD packages already made for some of the more popular Linux distributions, Ubuntu 14.04 included. You can see all of the available packages by clicking on this link. As of this writing, OMD version 1.20 is the latest so that’s what I’m going to install. Check and see what the latest version is before getting started.

To install the package we just downloaded, we’ll use the dpkg command.

sudo dpkg -i omd-1.20.trusty.amd64.deb

The installation is going to fail, this is what we want. You should see a bunch of warnings like “Package is not installed”, with dpkg eventually stopping with an error.

When these missing packages were found, dpkg automatically notified the package manager (apt) and we can install all of them with one simple command.

sudo apt-get -f install

There are quite a few packages that will be installed now. MySQL will prompt you to select a root password for the database server.

In addition to installing all of the dependancies needed for OMD, aptitude also went ahead and installed OMD for us at the same time. So there is no need to run the dpkg command again. You can verify OMD is installed by simply running “omd” from a command prompt.

[email protected]:~$ omd
Usage (called as site user):
omd help Show general help
omd version [SITE] Show version of OMD
omd versions List installed OMD versions
omd sites Show list of sites
omd update Update site to other version of OMD
omd start [SERVICE] Start services of one or all sites
omd stop [SERVICE] Stop services of site(s)
omd restart [SERVICE] Restart services of site(s)
omd reload [SERVICE] Reload services of site(s)
omd status [SERVICE] Show status of services of site(s)
omd config ... Show and set site configuration parameters
omd diff ([RELBASE]) Shows differences compared to the original version files
omd umount Umount ramdisk volumes of site(s)
General Options:
-V <version> set specific version, useful in combination with update/create
omd COMMAND -h, --help show available options of COMMAND

Next, we need to create the first OMD instance. Most of the time, the first instance will be the only instance. We need to choose a name to identify the OMD instance. This can be anything you like. I’m going to use monitoring. To create an instance called monitoring, use the omd command.

sudo omd create monitoring

This usually goes pretty quickly. You might see a warning from apache – “….could not reliably determine the server’s fully qualified domain name….” but this is nothing to be worried about. It will not affect functionality.

Now that the instance has been created, we need to start it.

sudo omd start monitoring

This command started all of the necessary services. You can now access your OMD web interface by opening http:///monitoring in your web browser. The username is omdadmin and the password is omd. You will want to change the password.

After logging in, you see all of the user interface options available to you.

I prefer Check_MK. Simply click on the package you want to access and go from there.

Stay tuned. My next post will be on how to monitor an ESXi hypervisor with Check_MK. If you have any issues, feel free to ask questions in the comments below. Thanks!

This may be a minor point or you may just want more granular control but if you install gdebi and use that to install OMD it will be a easier process gdebi is well documented and time saver when installing deb packages.